“Peninsulars
of thought and feeling out into the larger
world”
(Emily Dickinson)
I first encountered
Diana Howard’s
paintings in the early 1970s, their unique
fusion of the real and observed with the
imaginative and poetic – a woman in
exotic medieval costume taking a snake for
a walk by night in a moonlit topiary garden
above all – striking an immediate chord
of intense, inward reflection. Taken together
with the guilelessness and innocence with
which her vision was consistently realised,
she was making work quite unlike that of
any other artist I knew. Nearly 40 years
on, in the work she has produced for this
show, all of those qualities would still
seem to hold true absolutely, the only difference
now being that, after some four decades of
living surrounded by the most remote (and
beautiful) of Suffolk gardens and landscapes,
what she paints and just how she paints it
have changed significantly.
This is, I feel, particularly
apparent in the much greater directness
of approach to her subject matter and also
in the lightening and intensifying of the
palette she has now started to use. So,
gone for the most part, are any mystical
medieval or literary references, to be
replaced by those moments of powerful and
magical experience she finds within her
rich daily life – the birds in the
garden that tap at the window of whatever
room in the house she happens to be in, the
bees from the hives there swarming in a thunderstorm,
the boxing hares that move around her as
she walks in the fields and common that surround
the house.
There would seem still to be occasional,
and nicely surprising, breakouts from this,
for example The Tower, a charged, mysterious
work that harks back somewhat to that earlier,
medieval strand in her subject matter. But,
like all the works in this show, it now makes
use of a very different tonal and colour
range and a much looser way of working too,
one that owes a good deal to working much
more directly from nature than she ever did
in the past, as a significant group of works
in this show make clear. In these generally
smaller pieces we see Diana Howard paying
close and sensitive attention to the observed
world around her and, painted with the same
lyrical affection she brings to the more
composed pieces, she imbues them with a quite
unmistakeable spirit of place.
Writing of Diana’s work some 25 years
ago the artist Graham Arnold observed how
it invested “the invisible with the
logic of the visible”. Nothing has
changed in these beautiful paintings here,
humming with expectancy, possessed of a sense
of immanence and quietude that remains very
particularly her own. They are works which
will never stop opening your eyes to the
visual and sensual beauty of the world.
Nicholas Usherwood
Features Editor, Galleries Magazine, July
2008
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